‘There are opportunities for telecoms players in Nigeria’

Michael Ikpoki, a lawyer by training, once served as the Managing Director of MTN Ghana before his appointment as the first indigenous Chief Executive Officer of MTN Nigeria in 2013. In this interview with Ibrahim Apekhade Yusuf he speaks on the milestones recorded thus far by the largest telecommunications firms in Nigeria, which currently has over 60 million subscribers. Excerpts:

MTN has evolved from a telecommuni-cations firm to an Information and Communi-cations Technology (ICT) firm. What informed this transformation?

I think the reality of our business is that MTN has been primarily a voice business. But we have grown our core business, which are voice and data beyond imagination. However, about a few years ago, we recognised a new opportunity in ICT, which redefines our focus, by so doing investing in infrastructure.

Today, we have 47 data centres across Africa. We have fibre all over Africa. We have technology platform that enable us provide other services, especially to support other sectors of the economy. That is why we have expanded to become an ICT business. It was part of the reason we created MTN Business to focus on how do we service corporate, the Small and Medium scale Enterprises, to see how we can enable them with all forms of solutions, and make businesses a lot more profitable and efficient. So that is really how we have evolved. Our focus now at MTN, even as a group is to support business developments beyond the horizon. Our believe is that to grow our economy in Africa, there is need to grow business and we believe that our role at MTN is closely and significantly tied to that.

As a full-fledged ICT firm, what are the new challenges envisaged?

I think they are the usual challenges if you are in key business like ours. We are used to have challenges, which include fibre cuts, v multiple to over regulation and the rest. To me, what I considered the biggest issue, which is a challenge, also an opportunity is how to we create more digital literacy. For instance, when we talk about SMEs, if you are one today and planned setting up a business, you don’t have to spend money on IT, because MTN has cloud services where you can download information from the cloud at a fraction of a cost. From there you can get software that helps you run your business efficiently.

But the biggest issue today is how to get more people aware of these opportunities. How do we create that literacy so that more and more people, businesses, even established ones can find that some of these solutions can become useful to them for efficient business management.

So I think that is really the big issue. Our core business of voice is natural, people can pick up a phone and talk, but tide is fast changing and technology is developing at the speed of light, so we believe that Nigeria and indeed Africa should not be left behind. As such, it has become necessary to create digital awareness. For me that is the challenge, which is a good one and if we can overcome it, then it means we can have more people becoming digitally literate and our ecosystem becomes robust for it. Looking at the informal sector from the angle of SMEs, it has been said that these set of businesses are critical to growing the economy.

What infrastructure does MTN has in place to help deepen broadband penetration in the country for improved quality of service?

I think the issue about data is about investments and more investments. I can tell you that we have invested quite heavily on infrastructure. For example, on the international bandwidth, we have the West African Cable System (WACS) cables. A huge investment has gone into that. We equally have investment in data collection, such as metropolitan fibre, but I think the reality of data, if you remember, there was a time we didn’t have voice coverage everywhere, but today, voice coverage has gone to over 90 per cent of the country, but in data, it is just about 50 per cent of the country because it takes time. We have to upgrade our sites to 3G, build in fibre to support it; provide backhaul structure, the build out of all those infrastructure take time. What we are trying to do is to focus on lots of places where we have more densed coverage and as you know, data unlike voice, where you can talk for about three to five minutes, data, people are on it all the time. So, the experience, the speeds are very important and the more customers you have on data, it means you have to continue to roll out services and improve your coverage.

Our focus now is densifying coverage in lots of the key markets. We are monitoring new customers that come in and we are ensuring that we improve coverage in most of those of markets, so that we can give the right kind of speed that is required. The reality is that data, just like voice, it will take us sometime, but we shall continue to invest to ensure we meet the need of our customers.

Could you expatiate more on what MTN is doing to improve services generally?

Generally, the most important thing in managing services is about investment. This is because at the end of the day, if you are acquiring customers, you have to make sure that you have enough infrastructures to support good quality service.

The most important as I said earlier is having quality investment on ground. As you know, MTN shall continue to invest aggressively to making sure that we acquire more customers and give them required services. Another thing is operational improvement, last you will recall that we did some changes in our organisation structure by outsourcing the management of the network to third party.

Last year, we moved about 230 of our engineers into Ericsson and Huawei, because these are technology companies, which have the responsibility to manage the networks. We have done that and equally made some changes in our organisational module, where we sold our towers to third party, a company called INT. What they will be doing is that they will help us manage our towers with focus on ensuring that the infrastructure is working, they can deal with the many issues around by making sure there is adequate availability of service, among others.

So, with that whole model, we are seeing improvement and I think our focus is to make sure that we continue to invest and support the partners to deliver on the right quality of service expected. Having said all these, there are other factors, which are also reality. For instance the environment in which we are in; power supply, which dropped significantly last month to about 1.5 megawatts, so that tells you lots of the outages we have had are power related.

The issue about having a robust power sector is very critical. No matter how hard we try, it is still an issue we have to contend with. It is however an area been given lots of attention by government.

There is this issue around Internet of Things (IoT). How is MTN championing that revolution in Nigeria?

Well, lots of ways. It is a simple way by which machines talk to themselves. The most basic example is machine to machine, vehicle tracking.

Today, by putting a machine in your car, you can actually track where the car goes to; track location, the speed and others. So, it is basic tool. For example also, today, if you look at the economy, the logistics around putting such chip in your vehicle, you can easily track and manage the efficiency of how you use your fleet, so that is a basic step.

As we go further, the technology become more complex, by then, we will be looking at your fridge talking to your car talking to you. You will have smart home concept, meaning that within your home you can regulate how things work. The onus of it is you’re using technology to secure your asset, that is the stand point and as the economy continues to grow, more services of such will come on board.

But to what extent do you think the IoT will impact the economy generally?

If you talk about SMEs for example, one thing that is key in this their survival is lowering the cost of entry, making it easy for people to do business at cheaper cost and by providing the kind of services we are providing, we can actually enable a lot of SMEs to survive because we lower the cost of operation, so if you get to the MTN Yhello directory today, and subscribed to some of the services we have, including Software as a Service (SaaS); Cloud as a Service (CaaS), among others, MTN is able to reduce the cost of entry. A lot of SMEs don’t survive the first two years because of the high barrier cost, which in itself is an opportunity. Secondly, I think even for larger companies, at the end of the day, every company must work hard to reduce cost and improve efficiency. A lot of the tools are there, even for bigger corporates. MTN can house your entire IT infrastructure in our data centre. Today, we have a Tier 3 data centre in Lagos, an international world class one, where we can host IT infrastructure, so today, for quite a number of banks, we host their infrastructure because it is not their business. So we take away those operational costs, which they would have had to in cure while managing to kinds of IT needs. Those are examples and as we go along, we shall continue to impact businesses positively with our infrastructure. We have different tools to manage businesses using technology.

There are insinuations in some quarters that MTN is monopolising the industry’s profit. How would you react to this?

Look, MTN is a company competing in a market like every other businesses. MTN, like other companies were given a license in 2001 and we have been running our business as efficiently as we can. I really don’t understand what this issue is all about. Nigeria is a very competitive market, which is the bottom line for businesses and the industry we have found ourselves. What we have tried to do over the years is to compete, but we have invested very aggressively. With all modesty, we are not where we are today because we folded our hands and watch. We have invested heavily.

Today, MTN Nigeria has invested over $15 billion since inception into the Nigerian economy. We have paid taxes of over N1trillion we have created jobs for lots of partners that you see today, which have had a multiplier effect on the economy. So, we have run a successful business in a very difficult terrain. We don’t see why our quest for wider and improved service delivery should be seen as a threat. All telecommunications players have equal opportunity to compete in the market. All of us are competing out there, so I don’t know why there is this whole issue about one player taking the whole profit. I can tell, we are running our business the best way we can, rendering se enabling economic investing, managing our channels, working with partners, employing people, among others. We are doing the best we can. So, for me, I think the market is a competitive one and the good thing about competition is that the value has been for the customers.

For instance, prices for these markets have come down on the account of improved competition. In the last four years, prices have come down by over 70 per cent in the Nigerian telecommunications sector. I think, the Nigerian market, like others in the world is a competitive one and we shall continue to compete.

My view is that all operators should strive to improve on their system. The situation where some players will be complaining about others is not fair. MTN don’t complain about other operators, we compete with them.